


Forever Seventeen

by pyrrhical (anoyo)



Category: The Vampire Diaries
Genre: F/M, second person narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-21
Updated: 2012-07-21
Packaged: 2018-05-18 14:09:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 376
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5931202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anoyo/pseuds/pyrrhical
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When you're seventeen, the idea of living forever is terrifying.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Forever Seventeen

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted 7/21/12 [here](http://pyrrhical.livejournal.com/187253.html%22).

When you're seventeen, the idea of living forever is terrifying. When you're seventeen, a week can be the end of the world, the longest time of your life. 

When you're seventeen, forever is something you read in books and it terrifies you, but but you're seventeen? "Terrifying" is just another word for "fascinating" or "romantic." No matter what kind of life you've lived, you haven't seen enough for "terrifying" to be what it truly can be.

Somewhere, inside, forever, terror, danger -- all of these things excite you, when you're seventeen.

Words take on a slightly different meaning when you're seventy, and you've been seventeen for fifty-three years. 

Forever starts to mean something when the first of the people who knew when you were seventeen start to die of old age, rather than supernatural force. Terror has reached new heights when you've seen fifty-three years of it playing across all the places you've been. Danger loses its romance once the adrenaline runs out.

When you're seventy, forever starts to stretch out in front of you like the horizon -- that place you know you'll never reach, but a part of you aches to. You don't quite know why, but you know it's the truth.

At a hundred and fifty, you understand. Forever is a long damn time, when it's always the same. When it's one thing after another, the people always the same, the story its own repetitive dance, no one ever learning their lesson, the actors always condemned to repeat the same mistakes.

When you're the one who's finally got the damn drift, something's got to give. Because forever? Is a long damn time.

Forever is a physical weight at two hundred, and you're what gives. You've felt it coming for years, maybe even decades. The fact that you can measure time in decades is just another weight, and it eases what you do next.

"Right on schedule," he says, smiling lazily.

You shrug. "I didn't know, then." You smile a piece of your own knowing.

"You know very little at seventeen," he says.

When you're seventeen, forever is a measurement of time. When you can measure centuries in tallies, forever is a measurement of being. 

"In a way," you say, "you know less at two hundred."


End file.
